Master failed -promote slave

The scenario is I have one master debian lenny running ispconfig3.3.3 hosting a couple of sites, emails, dns, and databases.

Slave a is in a datacentre and relies very little on the master other than to manage it and a coupe of DNS records.

Slave b is a mirror of Master with limited databases replicated (some of which are old) and using rsync to copy the contents of just the websites I believe.

Master has suffered a catastrophic failure and is at a remote location. I can't get it to boot. People who can see it tell me it reports a grub error 25. I won't be able to get to this Master until much later in the week.

Master and Slave B both sit behind a router which uses port forwarding to send all traffic to Master. The good news is, I've managed to now get the router to diver all traffic to Slave B.

Slave B is now serving up DNS records (which master previously did) and serve older versions of the websites... which is good for now.

In a ispconfig master slave setup, not all information from the master database is transferred to the slave(s) for security reasons. So you can not make the slave to be the master easily as the slave has not an exact copy of the master database, it has just the data that is relevant for its functions. My recommendation is that you restore the master server from your backup, the slave should work until then and serve the websites and mail services until the master is online again.

If you really want to make the slave a master, you will have to insert the missing data from the amster database to the slave database e.g. by restoring the mysql database backup of the ispconfig database of the master on the slave. But I did not tested that yet.

I had a feeling that may be the case. Which splits my thread into two questions.

The first is my temporary solution -
Slave C is operational as far as web serving, dns and database is concernerned.

Mail has a problem though. The server is able to send mails both in squirrel mail and through a mail client. However, the accounts don't seem to be able to receive mails. Mails that are sent to these accounts get the message back from "Relay access denied (in reply ro RCPT TO Command)"

My other question:
With the intention to rebuild a new master, presumably the best way to do this would be to do a complete fresh install of debian lenny with exactly the same settings as the old master and the run go0ogl3 restore script affectively restoring mysql databases and content?

With the intention to rebuild a new master, presumably the best way to do this would be to do a complete fresh install of debian lenny with exactly the same settings as the old master and the run go0ogl3 restore script affectively restoring mysql databases and content?

Click to expand...

I dont know that script, so I can not tell you which parts of the operating sytem are in that backup. Doing a restore as you described above should work in any case, maybe its even enough to install just a basic operating system and then run the restore, if your script has created a backup of the whole operting system.